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Martel Lefevre
god save me rejection from my reflection Mr Lefevre is an English antiquities dealer currently based out of New Orleans, where he lives with his six year old daughter (Ingrid Seraphine 'Inga' Lefevre, b. October 11 2003, half Turkish) and his cat, and keeps a small staff (valet, housekeeper, nanny, driver, part-time gardener). He used to fence competitively and still has trophies, albeit ones that gather dust when they're not being used as Inga's playthings; he plays the piano a little and hasn't lent his voice to choir since he was eighteen (but could, if he wanted to). His 6'3" appearance is pristinely elegant, usually only marred by the eyepatch over where his left eye used to be - which most people have learned not to bother asking about. The hair colour is, these days, the result of dye (he went grey and then white in his late teens and early twenties), which he's not particularly secretive about. He has a colorist and he's fine with that. Photos may exist of a twenty-something with a long white ponytail, but if they do, they're in England and you're never going to see them, ever, which has nothing to do with whether or not these theoretical pictures involve things like "clothing". Because they don't exist. Mr Lefevre is a deeply private individual and his business is none of yours. i want perfection, praying for the rapture The first thing to remember about Martel is that everything he does, he does five times more intense than a sane person would. This has its upsides; his willpower, focus and driving ambition can take him very, very far (admittedly not to places anyone really wants him to go, but let's not get into that just yet), and to the right mindset that same focus applied to his personal life can be incredibly attractive. On the flipside, he feels this deeply and it results in a personality prone to obsession, melodrama and overreactions. What is sometimes sort of charming is more often just kind of frightening, and it's only got worse as he's got older and his experiences and harmful excesses have taken their toll on his mental state. He's an extroverted introvert, ruthlessly manipulative, and he should never be permitted to get bored lest he go find something to occupy himself with. It will almost invariably be something you don't want him doing. His obsessive tendencies touch more or less everything in his life; he's a perfectionist with a work ethic to rival the most dedicated workaholic, it's been suggested that if he were going to sell his soul it'd be to a woman, his daughter has become the sun around which his life revolves. The extent to which he can devote himself to the people he loves doesn't really make up for the rest of him - it's really just another way in which he's sort of distressing, considering what kind of relationships it tends to make for. (Protip: not healthy ones.) He's painfully self-aware, but it rarely has any kind of tempering effect on him and his behaviour; being aware of something doesn't necessarily change it. He's not precisely a jealous man (the idea of feeling threatened strikes him as sort of laughable, which is obnoxiously arrogant and he is wholly unrepentant for that), but he does have some severely territorial tendencies; he likes for what's his to be his and for that to be respected, and he will sometimes go to unreasonable lengths to establish this for other people. Sometimes it just depends on his mood (and/or the alignment of the planets), but either way he is not the type of guy who shares well. Or...at all. Speaking of 'obnoxiously arrogant' - yes, he is. Adding insult to injury on the subject, this is less based on an inflated idea of himself than it is totally refusing to have any modesty about his capabilities. He is exactly as intelligent, powerful and dangerous as he thinks he is, and he's not shy about it. He's not inclined to abuse those not on his level just for the sake of it (because it strikes him as a waste of his time and if you have to knock around the weaker to prove how strong you are, you probably aren't), but he's also not very patient with them unless he sees a good reason to be and it can make him very difficult to get along with. In more general terms he is a very patient man, but it serves his purposes to keep this to himself and project an air of supreme impatience, mostly because it means he cuts short his dealings with idiots quicker. He's not inclined to suffer fools. All of this paints a picture of a really unpleasant bastard, and that's not inaccurate; that said, he's also magnetically charismatic, witty, and aware of how to play to his best advantage (when he feels like it). In conversation he tends to be very present, and it's not a matter of waiting for his turn to speak - he listens, he absorbs, he tries to understand and respond accordingly. He has a knack for people that is more often employed in knowing exactly what he shouldn't say and then making it worse, but he's just as capable of doing the opposite if he puts a little more effort in. He's observant, and while he seeks out the weak points, he doesn't necessarily twist the knife every single damn time. He is and is not good at talking to people; on the one hand, yes, he's eloquent and he gets people (to a degree, not entirely, and coloured by his perceptions and background), on the other hand he has for a very long time used words and conversation as just another tool in his distressing arsenal. What this means is that he's not used to being honest, just for the sake of honesty; he has a problem where if he thinks too hard about what he wants to say, he'll start tailoring it purely out of habit and it concerns him that in intimate conversations he might not be as honest as he wants to be. His solution ... sucks, a lot: he doesn't have these conversations. He tries to find other ways of expressing himself (which sometimes works and more often doesn't, because his internal logic is so fucking bizarre that he should come with a user's manual for anyone in his life), and he avoids conversations about things like feelings and whatnot. The best way to get pure unadulterated honesty out of Martel is either to get him drunk or catch him while he's distracted; you can surprise him into saying more than he might have intended to while he's thinking about something else! Lillias used to do this all the time, it drove him nuts. For the record, when he's drunk he comes in one of two varieties: ebullient or maudlin. The former is more likely. In idiosyncrasies, while he swears he does it incredibly rarely; it's not that he has some kind of moral or intellectual objection to the words, more that he likes to save them up for really special occasions, possibly so that they'll carry more weight coming from him. He also has a minor tendency to absent-mindedly talk to himself in the midst of conversations, when distracted or very tired or just totally disinterested in whoever he's talking to and whatever they're talking about. 'cause it's strange and getting stranger The Lefevres are an old money family based mainly in Dorset, England, with French heritage they came to by dint of aristocracy that skipped out across the channel during the French revolution. There's another branch of the family in the south of France (Aquitaine), and the respective English and French cousins are actually fairly well connected to each other - with one exception. That exception would unsurprisingly be Martel Seton Lefevre, born January 4th 1971 and the only son of Rogatien and Victoria Lefevre. He was raised to be privileged and well educated in the lap of luxury, not precisely doted upon by his parents (who hadn't intended to have a child and weren't sure, in their own slightly obsessive world of two, what to do with one now that they had him) but certainly viewed with no small amount of pride for his precociously quick intellect. The Lefevres were a Catholic family, and raised their son the same way mostly out of habit; he was initially devout, but became progressively more and more disillusioned with the church itself and had difficulty separating his personal faith from his problems with the institution. Relevantly, he and childhood friends (Karlton Pankhurst and Astor Hawke) became close to Father William Vane - who'd taken an interest in their educations. Vane introduced them to an Argentine (witch) woman, Seraphina Rossi, who was responsible for the boys' awakening and first foray into the supernatural; she was also dealing with an unattainable romance with the Dorset priest and eventually the conflicts of their respective faiths and mutual attraction led to her leaving England. Unwilling to blame either Vane or Seraphina (who were essentially in loco parentis and could clearly do no wrong, even to each other), Martel laid blame at the doorstep of the church and promptly turned his back on it. In retrospect he's considered that particular last straw with Catholicism essentially a child's anger at discovering the world doesn't always do what he wants it to, but as he's had plenty of valid problems with the church before and since then he's never reconsidered his stance. Whatever else it was, it was a turning point in the direction of his life; he slowly distanced himself from the brotherly closeness with Astor and Karlton, mastering what Seraphina had offered them and pursuing less gentle avenues of study. His repeated refusals to cease what he'd been doing brought him in direct conflict with Father Vane, and he was one of the first to distance himself from Martel - although it would be a long time before anything that Martel had done could be definitively pinned on him, and they maintained a strained relationship for some time. An eventual ultimatum from the priest was rejected out of hand, and Martel found himself summarily cut off; he was left bitter and seething about this perceived unfairness. In his early twenties, he crossed paths with a former priest (Andrew Simons) who'd attended seminary with Vane and who was similarly discontent with his faith (in his case, of course, it was because he'd actually managed to do something so unpleasant that even the church, historically having a tendency to protect its own, didn't want to cover his ass any more and he'd been defrocked for it) and as he began cutting ties with his old friends (and his then-girlfriend, Petra del Rey, who eventually left him of her own accord) he decided to see where this association would go. Directly to crazy town! ...no, really, that's pretty accurate. He never would have got as far as bringing down his ecclesiastic enemies, mostly because on his own he was relatively inept and Martel was fairly disinterested in his ultimate goals (which he viewed as impractically deluded at best), but his dabbling in darker magic and Martel's own pursuit of the same drew the attention of more Tradition-based mages who found these antics less entertaining. What with how Martel was not inept, and was developing this bad habit of killing people. By this point, somewhere in his mid-twenties, he'd sealed the end of his friendship with Hawke by stealing his girlfriend (Lillias Kaplan, who went pretty damn willingly), and was busily establishing a reputation for power, efficience and ruthlessness; it was admittedly mostly his antics, albeit not his identity, that drew the disapproving eye in their direction. This eventually culminated in something that was hardly a show-down at all; Martel skipped town with Lillias to France and left Andrew and his other cohorts to deal with the fallout on their own, and he gathers most of them died. Unfortunately, Astor had been involved in curtailing Andrew's activities and eventually in the aftermath he did get wind of Martel's involvement, hilariously from one of Lillias's other entertainments (the ones that Martel wasn't, at the time, at all aware of). They'd had their own disputes, and he pursued the trail for a while until it went cold and, with other priorities to worry about, gave up in disgust. In France - Bastia, Corsica, more accurately - Martel avoided his relatives and set up house with Lillias; their admittedly tempestuous relationship became strained in places as his studies took him down paths that she wasn't entirely comfortable with. They lived there for several years as he rebuilt his work in antiquities and experimented with demon summoning (really), but in 2003 an argument during her pregnancy led to a breaking point and the casual infidelities that she'd hidden from him for most of their previously off-and-on involvement came to light when she (in an extremely ill-advised move) lashed out by throwing them in his face. It marked the immediate end of their engagement, the death of the several men she'd mentioned and one he found out about on his own, and a shift in his priorities. In a way she got what she'd wanted in the first place; he did curtail a lot of the things that had been threatening his (at the time) tenuous grip on his sanity, but unfortunately he did so because he intended to raise their child as a single parent and was concerned about his ability to do so. He secured a custody agreement ("It's mine") and his daughter, who he left the country with in early 2004, moving from the south of France to, of all fucking places, Los Angeles. 2005 was another fun year, when enemies he'd made in England caught up to him in the states (by accident, which was funnier in retrospect than it was at the time) and got lucky, managing to take out his eye. This is probably the only reason they survived the encounter; he was too busy trying to manage the pain and get himself away to do something about this sudden disability to respond in a sufficiently homicidal manner. They died not long after at the hands of an American hitman that he'd contracted almost before his plane hit the ground. Hawke should probably thank him; the ungrateful alcoholic mastermind who went down in LA was a thorn in the side of basically everyone he'd ever met, ever. Since then he's added a driver to his staff (he's still bitter) and consistently refused to actually repent or reform; the rearranging of his practises has mostly been a matter of pragmatism and becoming less reckless rather than remorse. ("I'm not doing that, it's stupid.") In 2009, he had a small problem with some very irritating vampires who decided to threaten his daughter; he handled it, but afterwards found himself obliged to leave California in a hurry and after spending an ill-advised Christmas in Bastia, he bought a house in New Orleans and started again. Again. and everything's contagious it's a modern middle ages The Elenium is, as those of you who have been paying attention or found yourselves unable to escape me know, one of two high fantasy trilogies by David and Leigh Eddings devoted to the antics and adventures of Sparhawk, a Pandion Knight, his Queen's Champion and later her Prince Consort. Martel features in the first trilogy as one of the primary antagonists; he's introduced as Sparhawk's opposite and this more or less carries on throughout the three books in which he makes life difficult for everyone around him including the people with whom he's nominally allied. This is pretty obviously not the Elenium. Martel Lefevre is an adaptation in about three different directions, incorporating elements of (most obviously) the Elenium (characterisation, cast, quite a few events and themes), Jane Eyre (it's a long story, but Inga had to come from somewhere - he is much better looking than Rochester, though, which we can put down to the fact Martel was also set up in his original canon to be better looking than his brother, no lie) and old World of Darkness (although I think he'd probably qualify as an Orphan, rather than coming from a specific Tradition? regardless!). Despite being kind of patchwork and the contemporary setting, he's probably the AU I've done that's the closest to canon (again, thematically and with regard to some recognizable events in his life), although I promise he will not be laying siege to the Vatican any time soon. Probably. He may or may not have been entertaining the idea at one point, but would prefer not to say. bodies making chemistry, bodies are my family and if jesus really died for me * DUDES :D??? then jesus really tried for me *'Lillias Kaplan' ∞ Martel's ex-fiancée and Inga's mother (not to mention the former mistress of Martel's former best friend Astor Hawke), with whom he hasn't had a civil conversation in a little more than six years; they had an acrimonious split in mid-2003 when he discovered the infidelities she'd kept from him (several of those men did not see 2004). He insisted on a paternity test but probably would have found a way to take Inga from her regardless of the test results (he is the father, which coupled with the fact he was actually in love with her is probably the reason Lillias is...alive). At present he has full, uncontested custody and money may or may not have changed hands to encourage her to leave it uncontested. Her periodic and increasingly melodramatic attempts at reconciliation culminated in Martel filing for a restraining order in 2009. Imagine what their relationship was like. *'Inga Lefevre' ∞ The innocent byproduct of Lillias and Martel's tumultuous (to put it kindly) relationship, Ingrid Seraphine Lefevre was born in France, October 2003, and has so far lived most of her life in Los Angeles under the care of her father and an English nanny, Katherine Bagnall. She's clever, spoiled, and the apple of her father's (one remaining) eye. She likes reading, telling stories and being Given Things, and during the weeks where Martel is distracted or busy, she can invariably rely on weekly singing lessons at the piano to get his time and attention. When she can reach the stove, he'll probably teach her how to cook. bodies in the way of me, bodies in the cemetary So, magic! Martel began studying spellcrafting and similar when he was a child, with his father's permission and under the affectionate tutelage of Seraphina Rossi (who was not a friend of their family but was a close personal friend of the family priest); this was probably one of the nicest and gentlest times in his life. At the same time he was learning French at home, Castellano with Seraphina and Latin in school - so it was a really fun time, although these days he's more proficient in French and Latin than he is with his slightly rusty skills with Spanish. His education in sorcery was grounded initially in spells relating to the mind and perception, and conjuring; from there he moved further into practical magic and the defensive/offensive varieties. He's always had a knack for anything that involves fire, which is great, let me tell you; he's also a skilled curse-breaker, which at this point is...like a charmingly horrifying hobby. This education, meanwhile, came to an abrupt end in his late teens when Seraphina made her apologies and left the country, leaving behind a few gifts and keepsakes and no contact details. Vane's explanation ('...she does that') was insufficient in a lot of ways, but to the point it was an unsatisfying way to cease learning and none of her students were entirely content with it. (Karlton missed her but not the lessons, which he'd never really managed to keep up with the other boys in.) Martel was unique in that he found the worst possible ways of continuing his study, and his explorations ranged along much darker lines than anything she would've been willing to teach him; death and the demonic were fairly common focuses for what he ended up pursuing. He is to this day really very good at what he's set his mind to, but there are some aspects of his skillset that are damaging to the user as much as his targets, and he's toned down a lot of the more reckless behaviour he indulged in when he was in his twenties. Magic is not the only way in which Martel is dangerous; from a very young age he was tall and too energetic for anyone else's own good, and in an effort to keep him out of trouble his father (who could sympathize, though his physical exertions had been limited fairly severely by a fall from a horse in his teens that shattered his hip and left him walking with a cane for the rest of his life) channeled his abundance of energy into anything he could possibly find him to do. He played football, he fenced, he swam, he rode horses, he was on a rowing team for a while (look, Rogatien was thorough), and he learned how to fight. While he can handle a gun fine if he has to, he's always going to be better with his fists and something with a blade, and honestly as a person with some concerning violent tendencies he prefers those methods. Rogatien was probably not intending for his son to ultimately get away with murder - but he did, and repeatedly. He typically plays off his weapons collection as being the eccentricity of a former competitive fencer, but there is a reason they're all kept in such good nick and it's not anal retentive attention to detail (although he's got that, too). and that's the way it's gonna be He has nothing to do with London Mysteries, sry guys, TWO MARTELS IS ENOUGH FOR ANY UNIVERSE. Martel was originally created by David and Leigh Eddings, who would probably disapprove of everything I have done with him since; I do not claim to own him, the Elenium, or Timothy Dalton's lovely face, and the lyrics used here are Robbie Williams' Bodies, which is a great song, FYI. Basically nothing here belongs to me and I'm fine with that, you should be too. Further adventures in PBs: I am also not Ozgu Namal (Lillias Kaplan), Karina Selin Gukrer (Ingrid Lefevre), Ted Danson (Rogatien Lefevre), Olivia Hussey (Seraphina Rossi) or Christopher Lambert (Astor Hawke). I am, however, totally a Savannah cat. You've caught me. Category:Characters Category:Living